“Did you ever find out what went with your little white cat?” Mama asks as they go inside.
“No. I think maybe he got shot,” Sandra says. “There’s been somebody shooting people’s cats around here ever since spring.” The screen door bangs behind her.
The oven is not dependable, and supper is delayed. Grandmother is restless, walking around the kitchen, pretending not to see the dirty linoleum, the rusty, splotched sink, the peeling wallpaper. She puzzles over the bunches of dill and parsley hanging in the window. Mama has explained about the night shift and overtime, but when Sandra sees Grandmother examining the row of outdoor shoes on the porch and, later, the hunting rifle on the wall, she realizes that Grandmother is looking for Jerry. Jerry took his hunting boots with him, and Sandra has a feeling he may come back for the rifle soon.
It’s the cats’ suppertime, and they sing a chorus at Sandra’s feet. She talks to them and gives them chicken broth and Cat Chow. She goes outside to shoo in the ducks for the night, but tonight they will not leave the pond. She will have to return later. If the ducks are not shut in their pen, the fox may kill them, one by one, in a fit—amazed at how easy it is. A bat circles above the barn. The ducks are splashing. A bird Sandra can’t identify calls a mournful good night.
“Those silly ducks wouldn’t come in,” she says, setting the table. Her mother and grandmother stand around and watch her with starved looks.
“I’m collecting duck expressions,” she goes on. “‘Lucky duck,’ ‘duck your head,’ ‘set your ducks in a row,’ ‘a sitting duck.’ I see where they all come from now.”
“Have a rubber duck,” says Mama. “Or a duck fit.”
“Duck soup,” says Grandmother.
“Duck soup?” Sandra says. “What does that mean?”
“It means something is real easy,” says Grandmother. “Easy as pie.”
“It was an old picture show too,” Mama says. “The name of the show was Duck Soup.”
They eat on the porch, and the moths come visiting, flapping against the screen. A few mosquitoes squeeze through and whine about their heads. Grandmother’s fork jerks; the corn slips from her hand. Sandra notices that her dishes don’t match. Mama and Grandmother exclaim over the meal, praising the tomatoes, the fresh corn. Grandmother takes another piece of chicken. “It has such a crispy crust!” she says.
Sandra will not admit the chicken is crisp. It is not even brown, she says to herself.
“How did you do that?” Grandmother wants to know.
“I boiled it first. It’s faster.”
“I never heard of doing it that way,” Grandmother says.
“You’ll have to try that, Ethel,” says Mama.
Sandra flips a bug off her plate.
Her grandmother sneezes. “It’s the ragweed,” she says apologetically. “It’s the time of the year for it. Doesn’t it make you sneeze?”
“No,” says Sandra.
“It never used to do you that way,” Mama says.
“I know,” says Grandmother. “I helped hay many a time when I was young. I can’t remember it bothering me none.”
The dog is barking. Sandra calls him into the house. He wants to greet the visitors, but she tells him to go to his bed, under the divan, and he obeys.
Sandra sits down at the table again and presses Grandmother to talk about the past, to tell about the farm Sandra can barely remember. She recalls the dizzying porch swing, a dog with a bushy tail, the daisy-edged field of corn, and a litter of squirming kittens like a deep pile of mated socks in a drawer. She wants to know about the trees. She remembers the fruit trees and the gigantic walnuts, with their sweeping arms and their hard, green balls that sometimes hit her on the head. She also remembers the day the trees came down.
“The peaches made such a mess on the grass you couldn’t walk,” her grandmother explains. “And there were so many cherries I couldn’t pick them all. I had three peach trees taken down and one cherry tree.”
“That was when your granddaddy was so bad,” Mama says to Sandra. “She had to watch him night and day and turn him ever’ so often. He didn’t even know who she was.”
“I just couldn’t have all those in the yard anymore,” says Grandmother. “I couldn’t keep up with them. But the walnut trees were the worst. Those squirrels would get the nuts and roll them all over the porch and sometimes I’d step on one and fall down. Them old squirrels would snarl at me and chatter. Law me.”
“Bessie Grissom had a tree taken down last week,” says Mama. “She thought it would fall on the house, it was so old. A tornado might set down.”
“How much did she have to pay?” asks Grandmother.
“A hundred dollars.”
“When I had all them walnut trees taken down back then, it cost me sixty dollars. That just goes to show you.”
Sandra serves instant butterscotch pudding for dessert. Grandmother eats greedily, telling Sandra that butterscotch is her favorite. She clashes her spoon as she cleans the dish. Sandra does not eat any dessert. She is thinking how she would like to have a bourbon-and-Coke. She might conceal it in a coffee cup. But she would not be able to explain why she was drinking coffee at night.
After supper, when Grandmother is in the bathroom, Mama says she will wash the dishes, but Sandra refuses.
“Do you hear anything from Jerry?” Mama asks.
Sandra shrugs. “No. He’d better not waltz back in here. I’m through waiting on him.” In a sharp whisper, she says, “I don’t know how long I can keep up that night-shift lie.”
“But she’s been through so much,” Mama says. “She thinks the world of you, Sandra.”
“I know.”
“She thinks Jerry hung the moon.”
“I tell you, if he so much as walks through that door—”
“I love those cosmos you planted,” Mama says. “They’re the prettiest I’ve ever seen. I’d give anything if I could get mine to do like that.”
“They’re volunteers. I didn’t do a thing.”
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t thin them either. I just hated to thin them.”
“I know what you mean,” says Mama. “It always broke my heart to thin corn. But you learn.”
A movie, That’s Entertainment!, is on TV. Sandra stands in the doorway to watch Fred Astaire dancing with Eleanor Powell, who is as loose as a rag doll. She is wearing a little-girl dress with squared shoulders.
“Fred Astaire is the limberest thing I ever saw,” says Mama.
“I remember his sister Adele,” says Grandmother. “She could really dance.”
“Her name was Estelle,” says Mama.
“Estelle Astaire?” says Sandra. For some reason, she remembers a girl she knew in grade school named Sandy Beach.
Sandra makes tomato sauce, and they offer to help, but she tells them to relax and watch the movie. As she scalds tomatoes and presses hot pulp through a food mill, she listens to the singing and tap-dancing from the next room. She comes to the doorway to watch Gene Kelly do his famous “Singin’ in the Rain” number. His suit is soaked, and he jumps into puddles with both feet, like a child. A policeman scowls at his antics. Grandmother laughs. When the sauce boils down, Sandra pours it into bowls to cool. She sees bowls of blood lined up on the counter. Sandra watches Esther Williams dive through a ring of fire and splash in the center of a star formed by women, with spread legs, lying on their backs in the water.
During a commercial, Sandra asks her mother if she wants to come to the barn with her, to help with the ducks. The dog bounds out the door with them, happy at this unexpected excursion. Out in the yard, Mama lights a cigarette.
“Finally!” Mama says with a sigh. “That feels good.”
Two cats, Blackie and Bubbles, join them. Sandra wonders if Bubbles remembers the mole she caught yesterday. The mole had a star-shaped nose, which Bubbles ate first, like a delicacy.
The ducks are not in the barn, and Sandra and her mother walk down a narrow
path through the weeds to the pond. The pond is quiet as they approach. Then they can make out patches of white on the dark water. The ducks hear them and begin diving, fleeing to the far shore in panic.
“There’s no way to drive ducks in from a pond,” Mama says.
“Sometimes they just take a notion to stay out here all night,” says Sandra.
They stand side by side at the edge of the pond while Mama smokes. The sounds of evening are at their fullest now, and lightning bugs wink frantically. Sometimes Sandra has heard foxes at night, their menacing yaps echoing on the hillside. Once, she saw three fox pups playing in the full moon, like dancers in a spotlight. And just last week she heard a baby screaming in terror. It was the sound of a wildcat—a thrill she listens for every night now. It occurs to her that she would not mind if the wildcat took her ducks. They are her offering.
Mama throws her cigarette in the pond, and a duck splashes. The night is peaceful, and Sandra thinks of the thousands of large golden garden spiders hidden in the field. In the early morning the dew shines on their trampolines, and she can imagine bouncing with an excited spring from web to web, all the way up the hill to the woods.
Shiloh
FROM Shiloh and Other Stories (1982)
Leroy Moffitt’s wife, Norma Jean, is working on her pectorals. She lifts three-pound dumbbells to warm up, then progresses to a twenty-pound barbell. Standing with her legs apart, she reminds Leroy of Wonder Woman.
“I’d give anything if I could just get these muscles to where they’re real hard,” says Norma Jean. “Feel this arm. It’s not as hard as the other one.”
“That’s ’cause you’re right-handed,” says Leroy, dodging as she swings the barbell in an arc.
“Do you think so?”
“Sure.”
Leroy is a truckdriver. He injured his leg in a highway accident four months ago, and his physical therapy, which involves weights and a pulley, prompted Norma Jean to try building herself up. Now she is attending a body-building class. Leroy has been collecting temporary disability since his tractor-trailer jackknifed in Missouri, badly twisting his left leg in its socket. He has a steel pin in his hip. He will probably not be able to drive his rig again. It sits in the backyard, like a gigantic bird that has flown home to roost. Leroy has been home in Kentucky for three months, and his leg is almost healed, but the accident frightened him and he does not want to drive any more long hauls. He is not sure what to do next. In the meantime, he makes things from craft kits. He started by building a miniature log cabin from notched Popsicle sticks. He varnished it and placed it on the TV set, where it remains. It reminds him of a rustic Nativity scene. Then he tried string art (sailing ships on black velvet), a macramé owl kit, a snaptogether B-17 Flying Fortress, and a lamp made out of a model truck, with a light fixture screwed in the top of the cab. At first the kits were diversions, something to kill time, but now he is thinking about building a full-scale log house from a kit. It would be considerably cheaper than building a regular house, and besides, Leroy has grown to appreciate how things are put together. He has begun to realize that in all the years he was on the road he never took time to examine anything. He was always flying past scenery.
“They won’t let you build a log cabin in any of the new subdivisions,” Norma Jean tells him.
“They will if I tell them it’s for you,” he says, teasing her. Ever since they were married, he has promised Norma Jean he would build her a new home one day. They have always rented, and the house they live in is small and nondescript. It does not even feel like a home, Leroy realizes now.
Norma Jean works at the Rexall drugstore, and she has acquired an amazing amount of information about cosmetics. When she explains to Leroy the three stages of complexion care, involving creams, toners, and moisturizers, he thinks happily of other petroleum products—axle grease, diesel fuel. This is a connection between him and Norma Jean. Since he has been home, he has felt unusually tender about his wife and guilty over his long absences. But he can’t tell what she feels about him. Norma Jean has never complained about his traveling; she has never made hurt remarks, like calling his truck a “widow-maker.” He is reasonably certain she has been faithful to him, but he wishes she would celebrate his permanent homecoming more happily. Norma Jean is often startled to find Leroy at home, and he thinks she seems a little disappointed about it. Perhaps he reminds her too much of the early days of their marriage, before he went on the road. They had a child who died as an infant, years ago. They never speak about their memories of Randy, which have almost faded, but now that Leroy is home all the time, they sometimes feel awkward around each other, and Leroy wonders if one of them should mention the child. He has the feeling that they are waking up out of a dream together—that they must create a new marriage, start afresh. They are lucky they are still married. Leroy has read that for most people losing a child destroys the marriage—or else he heard this on Donahue. He can’t always remember where he learns things anymore.
At Christmas, Leroy bought an electric organ for Norma Jean. She used to play the piano when she was in high school. “It don’t leave you,” she told him once. “It’s like riding a bicycle.”
The new instrument had so many keys and buttons that she was bewildered by it at first. She touched the keys tentatively, pushed some buttons, then pecked out “Chopsticks.” It came out in an amplified fox-trot rhythm, with marimba sounds.
“It’s an orchestra!” she cried.
The organ had a pecan-look finish and eighteen preset chords, with optional flute, violin, trumpet, clarinet, and banjo accompaniments. Norma Jean mastered the organ almost immediately. At first she played Christmas songs. Then she bought The Sixties Songbook and learned every tune in it, adding variations to each with the rows of brightly colored buttons.
“I didn’t like these old songs back then,” she said. “But I have this crazy feeling I missed something.”
“You didn’t miss a thing,” said Leroy.
Leroy likes to lie on the couch and smoke a joint and listen to Norma Jean play “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” and “I’ll Be Back.” He is back again. After fifteen years on the road, he is finally settling down with the woman he loves. She is still pretty. Her skin is flawless. Her frosted curls resemble pencil trimmings.
Now that Leroy has come home to stay, he notices how much the town has changed. Subdivisions are spreading across western Kentucky like an oil slick. The sign at the edge of town says “Pop: 11,500”—only seven hundred more than it said twenty years before. Leroy can’t figure out who is living in all the new houses. The farmers who used to gather around the courthouse square on Saturday afternoons to play checkers and spit tobacco juice have gone. It has been years since Leroy has thought about the farmers, and they have disappeared without his noticing.
Leroy meets a kid named Stevie Hamilton in the parking lot at the new shopping center. While they pretend to be strangers meeting over a stalled car, Stevie tosses an ounce of marijuana under the front seat of Leroy’s car. Stevie is wearing orange jogging shoes and a T-shirt that says CHATTAHOOCHEE SUPER-RAT. His father is a prominent doctor who lives in one of the expensive subdivisions in a new white-columned brick house that looks like a funeral parlor. In the phone book under his name there is a separate number, with the listing “Teenagers.”
“Where do you get this stuff?” asks Leroy. “From your pappy?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” Stevie says. He is slit-eyed and skinny.
“What else you got?”
“What you interested in?”
“Nothing special. Just wondered.”
Leroy used to take speed on the road. Now he has to go slowly. He needs to be mellow. He leans back against the car and says, “I’m aiming to build me a log house, soon as I get time. My wife, though, I don’t think she likes the idea.”
“Well, let me know when you want me again,” Stevie says. He has a cigarette in his cupped palm, as though sheltering it fro
m the wind. He takes a long drag, then stomps it on the asphalt and slouches away.
Stevie’s father was two years ahead of Leroy in high school. Leroy is thirty-four. He married Norma Jean when they were both eighteen, and their child Randy was born a few months later, but he died at the age of four months and three days. He would be about Stevie’s age now. Norma Jean and Leroy were at the drive-in, watching a double feature (Dr. Strangelove and Lover Come Back), and the baby was sleeping in the back seat. When the first movie ended, the baby was dead. It was the sudden infant death syndrome. Leroy remembers handing Randy to a nurse at the emergency room, as though he were offering her a large doll as a present. A dead baby feels like a sack of flour. “It just happens sometimes,” said the doctor, in what Leroy always recalls as a nonchalant tone. Leroy can hardly remember the child anymore, but he still sees vividly a scene from Dr. Strangelove in which the President of the United States was talking in a folksy voice on the hot line to the Soviet premier about the bomber accidentally headed toward Russia. He was in the War Room, and the world map was lit up. Leroy remembers Norma Jean standing catatonically beside him in the hospital and himself thinking: Who is this strange girl? He had forgotten who she was. Now scientists are saying that crib death is caused by a virus. Nobody knows anything, Leroy thinks. The answers are always changing.
When Leroy gets home from the shopping center, Norma Jean’s mother, Mabel Beasley, is there. Until this year, Leroy has not realized how much time she spends with Norma Jean. When she visits, she inspects the closets and then the plants, informing Norma Jean when a plant is droopy or yellow. Mabel calls the plants “flowers,” although there are never any blooms. She always notices if Norma Jean’s laundry is piling up. Mabel is a short, overweight woman whose tight, brown-dyed curls look more like a wig than the actual wig she sometimes wears. Today she has brought Norma Jean an off-white dust ruffle she made for the bed; Mabel works in a custom-upholstery shop.
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